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by Bernard Novick, Jeffrey S. Kress and Maurice J. Elias
Table of Contents
Organizations cannot sustain an infinite number of change initiatives. Therefore, you must pay careful attention to all promising solutions to explore their ramifications. Before deciding on a course of action, you must evaluate the likely consequences of each of your proposed solutions. The envisioning process is an excellent way to achieve this in a realistic, practical manner.
Of course, the best envisioning occurs in hindsight, and this chapter represents the hindsight derived from several program implementations. Sometimes, resources are not as plentiful as they appear to be; impending staff changes can create unforeseen negative consequences, and the school can be less ready for some options than for others. Entrenched factions lobbying for different ways to proceed might make some roads far more difficult to travel than they had first appeared. Realities can't be ignored. But potentially negative consequences do not have to bring needed efforts to a dead stop. Usually, you must consider a balance of positives and negatives—short and long term—for various constituencies and then devise a systematic way to evaluate the outcome of these possibilities. At the least, school members who help anticipate what might happen if they approach social-emotional learning and character education in a certain way tend to be more forgiving if things do not work out well. They know a serious effort was made to look ahead.
Having picked several areas in which to focus your efforts, it is time to consider the consequences, or outcomes, of the changes and innovations you are considering. This step will help you refine your problem statement or goal by identifying criteria for measuring progress.
As you think about outcomes, remember that actions may have both positive and negative ramifications that can reverberate beyond the actions' immediate focus. Bronfenbrenner's ecological theory provides a useful framework for thinking through the possibilities (Bronfenbrenner, 1979).He suggests considering the following areas when looking at the impact of a course of action:
Envisioning outcomes always requires strong consideration of the time and resources needed to reach a state of readiness in any area. Your mentor, CASEL, and the CEP can be invaluable sources of advice because they can share specific experiences and help you think through possibilities.
The use of the word “envision” reflects advances in emotional intelligence theory and hearkens back to the first step in the problem-solving process: focusing on signs of feelings. Looking at outcomes cannot be dispassionate. Here are some key questions for which you will want to solicit genuine answers:
Schwahn and Spady (1998) point out that lasting change requires strong, positive mobilization. Therefore, you should ensure that envisioning beneficial outcomes, however small, plays a prominent part in the process you use to consider consequences.
Your task as an administrator is to take the options from the previous chapter and set up a structure that ensures each one is given specific consideration. One way to do this is to use the “options and outcomes” procedure. Actually, this is a fancy title for a variation of the old process of diagramming sentences. For each option you generate, draw lines to allow the listing of possible consequences if it is followed. Some of these lines are labeled so that specific aspects of consequences are reviewed, such as short- and long-term effects; implications for staff, students, and parents; and other considerations mentioned in this chapter, suggested by your mentor, or generated in the course of problem solving and planning in your school.
Figure 7.1 contains a sample of the options and outcomes procedure for one option (“Option A”) to a hypothetical decision. In this example, the decision makers are interested in three areas: long-term outcomes, short-term outcomes, and implications for staff. You would write possible consequences for each of these areas in the branches of the chart. The procedure would be repeated for each possible option.
There are many ways to organize this process to maximize staff involvement, including:
By this time, you have set a goal for improving the social and emotional climate and character of your school and have arrived at specific options for achieving this goal. The step emphasized in this chapter, anticipating outcomes for various options, amounts to predicting the future. You need only ask your local weatherman or stockbroker to learn how easy that is. As you anticipate outcomes, stay in close communication with your mentor and review information about how other schools similar to yours set up programs. Their experience with implementing similar options can be instructive in your efforts to predict outcomes in your school.
Your ability to bring various options together in a creative and viable approach is important. No less important, however, is your ability to articulate a vision for the changes you hope to achieve and to keep this vision salient in the eyes of your staff. What's the big picture? Why are you doing all this? These and other questions will call on you to be clear about the specific outcomes you want to achieve. The process of bringing social-emotional initiatives into a school or district is dynamic. Discussing outcomes in a serious way serves to sharpen the vision of where the organization needs to be and can be. It becomes a matter of clarifying your vision and recognizing that, as with any visioning process, lenses do need to be cleaned off and adjusted at times.
The next chapter describes the process of moving toward a particular approach that will become the basis of action planning. Just how smooth that process will be depends on how much you and your staff share a vision and agree that you have fairly considered a range of options.
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